The Milky Way’s central region in visible light and near-infrared

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This image compares a visible light wide-field view (part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2) of the Milky Way’s central regions with a new near-infrared image taken with the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. While the image on the left is filled with vast numbers of stars, moving the slider reveals that far more stars, hidden behind clouds of dust, are revealed when this region is observed in the near-infrared.